Contemporary computing devices allow users to enter handwritten words (e.g., in cursive handwriting and/or printed characters), characters and symbols (e.g., characters in Far East languages). The words, characters and symbols can be used as is, such as to function as readable notes and so forth, or can be converted to text for more conventional computer uses. To convert to text, for example, as a user writes strokes representing words or other symbols onto a touch-sensitive computer screen or the like, a handwriting recognizer (e.g., trained with millions of samples, employing a dictionary, context and/or other rules) is able to convert the handwriting data into dictionary words or symbols. In this manner, users are able to enter textual data without necessarily needing a keyboard.
Applications have been developed that know how to handle this handwritten input, including sending the user input to a recognizer at appropriate times. These applications provide the user with various features related to both the handwritten ink as written and the text as recognized. To this end, these applications maintain the handwritten data (electronic ink) in association with any recognized text in their own internal data structures.
While such an electronic ink application provides valuable features to users, many other things that most users intuitively associate with ordinary text or rich text are not provided. For example, if a document having the electronic ink input is saved as a file that is later reopened, only the recognized text may be available, i.e., the handwriting part of recognized data may not be kept. Another significant problem is that text is easily understood by other applications, while the handwriting data is not. Thus, even if the handwriting data is preserved with a document, the handwritten data can only be understood by the application into which it was entered. For example, when the user wants to send a document having electronic ink therein to another computer (e.g., as an e-mail attachment), the other computer may not have a copy of that application, and thus cannot interpret the other application's ink data.
Still other features associated with text, such as cut and paste operations, are easily performed with text data. The application that receives text (via the paste operation) can easily insert it into existing text in an appropriate manner. For example, the text is automatically aligned with any existing text on its line, it can be easily reformatted, searched, and so forth. This is not possible with handwritten input and contemporary application programs.
In general, electronic ink does not behave like text in a number of significant ways. Notwithstanding, it is becoming apparent that users want electronic ink to be more interchangeable and/or like text with respect to transferring it among computing devices and/or different programs, editing functions, and so on.